I dropped Anna off at the airport this morning; she’s on a two week trip to the mainland to visit family. Plus, it’s been raining all day. These two things conspired to keep me inside all day wrapping up the release. (That’s not entirely true, a couple of friends came over with a lot of beer and I spent the better part of the afternoon in an alcohol-induced stupor. But I digress.)
Here are the changes in this release (HTTP, torrent, source). I’m hoping that we can get this 0.5 release wrapped up and move on to the new and interesting things coming in 0.6. (Translation: please don’t report any more damn bugs for this version!) The next beta will be a release candidate.
- NEW: AC3 encoding. This is a killer new feature that allows your receiver to play full surround sound from “unsupported” formats, like AAC and FLAC. My hat is off to Ryan Walklin who got it working in record time. I know, we’re supposed to be stabilizing things for 0.5 final, but this was just too damn cool not to work in. Go play some Apple Trailers and then throw your Apple TV out the window.
- FIX: The infamous and incredibly annoying “CAPETag” bug, manifested by a crash in the middle of music playlists (randomly, of course).
- FIX: GIF image loading was kind of broken. I’m surprised nobody noticed. I guess everyone’s pr0n collection has moved to JPEG? Boobs do look better in 24 bit color.
- FIX: A crash with keyboard layouts (thanks to Enrique and Roman).
- FIX: Text subtitles with more than two lines would have missing lines.
- FIX and FIX: Lots of fixes to smart folders. We now run asynchronously and timeout after a while if nothing has been returned. Memory handling has been fixed (thanks, Enrique!) so it doesn’t crash when scanning a smart-folder-source to the library. And we respect the folders scope when executing the query.
- FIX: Switching between full-screen and windowed mode has been fixed to return to the same windowed resolution.
- FIX: Hugely reduced latency with controllers (XBox360/Apple Remote). The difference is unbelievable with the XBox360 controller, it should be indistinguishable from a wired controller at this point.
- FIX: Crash when displaying SSA subtitles in some cases. Thanks to Bad Mr Frosty and Parag for helping me track this down!
- FIX: Minor changes to the way we do vsync, not sure if it will improve things for people having trouble, but it won’t make things worse.
- FIX: Revert the logarithmic volume change. Not sure if it’s a Mac thing or not, but it just made things really quiet for the majority of the volume range.
- FIX: Crash on exit when exiting when a script is running.
- FIX: Some erroneous references to /opt/local in the libraries we ship in Resources.
- FIX: 187.avi was getting stacked with 300.mkv, and I can assure you that the latter really doesn’t play well after the former. Although, come to think of it, Samuel L Jackson yelling “This is motherfucking Sparta!” would be pretty awesome.
- FIX: The XBMCHelper is now killed again when you disable it in the settings.
- NEW: Enrique added support for CoreFoundation’s exception handling, so that we better log those sorts of errors.
- FIX: Enrique fixed a few more memory leaks and built the latest libcdio to fix a crash.
- NEW: (Bonus subtitle-lover’s feature) Rather than just being able to select the lowly Arial font (or whatever you tossed in the media/Fonts directory in your application package (and come on, who does that?) you can now pick from a large number of Apple-supplied fonts. Seen below is Georgia Bold. Please let me know if you have an answer to the question posed.
I also cherry-picked some fixes from the linuxport branch, most notably:
- A crash opening context menus (yuvalt).
- Crash in Python selecting list items (nice one, vulkanr!)
- Better thread-safety in DLL trackers (charleydoes)
- Fixes to AC3/DTS buffering (elupus)
With these changes plus the crash on exit from the list above, Python support should actually be pretty solid, or at least getting there!
My sincere thanks to our community, you are all awesome. Almost 450 users on the forum, over 2000 posts, simply brilliant. We’re getting top-notch bug reports, and people are being really helpful and friendly.
Without further ado, your Barkley.
